My mom likes to remind me how difficult my birth was.
It was a Thursday. Or maybe a Wednesday. Either way, it was a weekday, and she points that out because of how much of an inconvenience it was since she was working when I broke her water.
She had a deadline at work. She was a journalist. She still is a journalist. I sometimes find myself getting into this habit of describing my mom in the past tense, as if she were already dead.
As if she were a part of my past, and not infused into a good chunk of my genetic mashup. My present, future, and where-the-time-gone.
Either way, my mom refused to take an ambulance. They cost too much, she said. She insisted on driving her electric blue Toyota Prius. While in labor. Late for some deadline for some story about some gawdawful shit. Actually, I think she told me one year what the news story was that I made her late for; it was a story about a roving gang of sentient chickens that had been experimented on by some weird Austrian poultry biologist that was running experiments on whether livestock with a conscience tasted better, but somehow the sentient chickens had overtaken their creator and were terrorizing the unsuspecting city-folk that had never seen a chicken in real life and didn’t realize how smart they had become.
I don’t know if any of that was true, or if she just told me that when I was a kid as something of a bedtime story. She told all of her stories in the same monochromatic tone without the slightest inflection in her larynx. I sometimes thought of my mom as a robot. Though I wasn’t the only one. My dad, apparently, I don’t know, I was too young to say for certain, but according to my mom, my dad left us because of how mechanical my mom acted.
She also didn’t have time to put makeup on.
That part of the story never seems relevant, but it’s one of those things that she remembers and she refuses to let it go.
Makeup-less, stressed about work, pregnant, alone and in labor, driving down the highway in her blue Toyota Prius, and she hit traffic. Or did traffic hit her? I’ve always been a bit confused by that phrase.
It ended up being the sort of traffic that she couldn’t get out of. It ended up being the traffic to end all other traffic.
I was born in the traffic, in the back of my mom’s blue Toyota Prius. I ruined the upholstery, and probably the blue book value, she sometimes added.
The traffic I was born in ended up being the traffic I was raised in.
My mom and I never quite could get out.
None of the other cars ended up ever moving.
Some smartass called it the Great Traffic Jam, and that’s what became our lives.
I’ve never lived outside of traffic. I live in the back seat of my mom’s car. It’s all I’ve ever known, so I wouldn’t say it’s all that abnormal.
My mom sometimes stresses out, though. She doesn’t like being cramped up for too long. She used to go through these spells where she would futilely honk the horn for hours on end. A lot of our neighbors would yell at her to shut up. They didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to be reminded that they couldn’t move their cars either.
Eventually, she would calm down. She started to drink heavily. It helped her cope, I think. A lot of people started to drink.
But no one wandered too far from their car. I think everyone expected that one day, somewhere far up the road, a place no one could see but wanted to imagine, the traffic would begin to clear, and they would continue on with their lives as if nothing had happened.
Those optimistic thoughts, I imagine, are what keep people going in this post-traffic age.
Fred Aiken Writing 